Aweulekuula, Glad to see you back, your carvings are Really Awesome but as long as you've been carving I'm sure you don't need us to tell you you are that great, A Master. We DO LOVE your work. these guys are so alive looking and look like they're hundreds of years old at the same time. You have certainly got my attention and I Respect what it takes for you to create stuf like this.
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For the small wooden images I usually use a Dremel tool, especially when working with woods as tough as ebony and on a small scale. Normal chisels would be mindnumblingly difficult to use in these cases. The lava/basalt tikis start out using a hand-held circular saw with a diamond blade for the rough-cuts. Then tunsgten-carbide Dremel bits for the finer details, and finally tons and tons of sandpaper on both the wooden and stone images.

This tiny little fellow is just about three and a half inches tall, but probably one of the happiest Ki'i I ever carved.

This was an unusual beach stone from the Big Island, very elongate and smooth. It was about 4 and 1/2 inches long and the Ki'i that came from it was purposefully given a smooth and "washed out" feel to it. It was gifted to a spiritualist living in the Midwest.

Good to see you back Marcus! With a lot of magical carving... you feel comfortable style ancestral may be you should try to find the gesture of the old with the techniques of yesteryear. I myself start this kind of reflection, I think there are many things to do...

Ed Kaiwi (formerly from Kauai) from Maui is a native cultural practitioner and Kahuna. He had asked me a few weeks ago whether I would be willing to carve his official staff of office. I was blown away by that request. Here is the result, the 'Aumakua image topping the staff is a Hawaiian Eagle ('Io) spirit.

This staff image just "happened". The detailed face at the Ki'i's feet followed by one stylized face and a number of stylized chins represent the chain of ancestors while the staggered headdress represents the chain of spirits towards the higher realms.

In the summer and fall of 1997, when I first decided I wanted to carve Ki'i, I ordered a huge chunk of ebony off of eBay. I found out that the Uhiuhi wood I would have liked to carve had gone extinct in the wild and that ebony would be the best substitute to approach its qualities. The second image I carved from that chunk (my third image ever) was never intended to be more than an exercise, to see whether I could get the body posture right before I carved my first Akua Ka'ai (stick image).

This was the result. I was never really happy with it, since the base didn't allow the Ki'i to stand up and it wasn't a pure Akua Ka'ai or 'Aumakua image. So for more than ten yeasr this poor little guy has been sitting on the back of shelves or in the closet.

Four days ago, as I was packing up my carving stuff after finishing the last Christmas gift images, I felt hat maybe it was time to fix those "mistakes" on that image and I went back and removed the stubby base, freed the arms from the torso, and re-shaped the chest a bit. Now he is a pure 'Aumakua style image and sits on my shelf with the rest of my personal Ki'i. I guess he was my own Christmas present.